In a fiber-to-home network, the optical links between an optical line terminal (OLT) and an optical network terminal (ONU) carry Ethernet traffic. The OLT, located at a service provider's central office, performs conversion between the electrical signals used by a service provider's equipment and the fiber optic signals to be carried by optical fibers to a number of ONUs, located near a customer's equipment. The physical link between the service provider's equipment and the customer's equipment is known a “last mile”. Occasional testing of optical links is important to ensure high quality traffic-rate for the end users.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.1 committee developed the IEEE 802.1ag standard and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) SG 13 Q5 WG developed the Y.1731 standard for Ethernet service Operations, administration, and Management (OAM) for connectivity fault management and performance management. Currently, some existing products implement these Ethernet OAM standards and support for performance management such as frame loss measurement. However, traditional implementation of these Ethernet OAM services requires additional processing power, and therefore, suffer from a scalability point of view. Further, as OAM traffic is unable to reach line-rate during testing, frame loss detection and packet-error rate measurement are only meaningful for severe lossy links.